It's been 5 days since Resident Evil 7 teaser was released, and the finger mystery still haunts us all. It has to be of some use right? Recently I talked about our thoughts on the E3 and about how in games, things must be there for a reason, and that is precisely what I want to talk about today.

To progress in REalM: Walk of Soul, Iris needs to find the effects, that which is a part of herself and that in game are presented as dresses. Crow, which lets you warp to the Nexus (the place where you can choose which area to explore); Dove, which allows you to make higher jumps; Automaton, which allows you to use its blade to activate some switches and finally Thorn, which looks cool. Thing is, there is really no real need in the game for those extra things they do. They look cool, but then what? Being so important storywise, how come they feel useless. There is no problem if they are just McGuffins like the medallions in Ocarina of Time, problem arises when you can change your appearance and affect a little of gameplay. But what is the point of affecting gameplay if, that effect does nothing? Well, this is precisely what we needed to rework in the game.

Next, one of the things that was pointed out to us was the use of a health system. Iris can withstand 4 hits before dying, but what does it bring into the game itself? She can't fight back, besides hitting you, things do not present a real problem to the player, you could just run and take a few hits to reach the next place and loose virtually nothing.

​Right now, if you die in the game, you respawn in the same area you died, but at the entrance. Not at the start of the "level," but at the start of that precise section you are right now. That would give the player the opportunity to tank hits from the enemies, evade one or two and reach the next section. If they died at that one, they would just respawn in there with full health. So, enemies presented no real danger. Now, we could just add more enemies, but REalM is not about that, it is about surviving. Given the connondrum, we either removed the enemies altoghether or added more, none of these work for us, so we opted for a third choice.

The original health system system came as a no brainer for us, but in reality, after a lot of analysis, we came to the conclusion that the health system actually hurts the game. So, our third choice: remove the health system and let Iris die from one hit.

​To us, the choice was obvious. By keeping the health system, we would have to give Iris a way to defend herself and as stated above, it would go against the principles of the game. So, keeping the health is a no no. By removing it, we are taking away something that wasn't doing anything right now and, it would give more meaning to the enemies by not letting players just dash through danger tanking some hits. Nevertheless, a couple of enemies would be vey poorly designed to work in this scenario which is why we are reworking some enemies so that they feel better with the new mechanic.